A response by P. Benner to K. Cash, "Benner and expertise in nursing: a critique"

Articulating the knowledge, skill and ethos embedded in practice is the explicit goal of From Novice to Expert, in order to inform our science by raising new issues and questions. The work is not inherently conservative, since it does not assume a monolithic position in opposition to all other perspectives. It does not call for traditionalism, i.e. using tradition as the only source of authority and power. Instead, it attempts to articulate the best in our current practice while raising questions about the silences and hidden assumptions in the Cartesian tradition, a tradition which holds that there are, in principle, no limits to formalism, that skill is just a mechanistic following of formal propositions held as representations in the mind, that contrasts necessarily form oppositions and contradictions rather than discovery and dialogue, and that all perspectives are best understood from an objectivist point of view. Such a hegemonic epistemological stance may indeed be the most conservative position of all. If we continue to force our ways of knowing into one hegemonic mold for the sake of 'winning' in a power discourse, we may have 'lost' before we have begun, because our agenda will continue to be described and evaluated in terms of what it is not rather than in terms of what it is (Benner, 1994b).